


Two Roads

by Zanne



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-07
Updated: 2011-06-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 21:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zanne/pseuds/Zanne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean's thoughts about his life intersected by Robert Frost's poem <em>The Road Not Taken</em>. </p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Roads

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the lovely **[](http://gestaltrose.livejournal.com/profile)[**gestaltrose**](http://gestaltrose.livejournal.com/) ** for beta-ing! Kripke owns everything but the poem, which belongs to Robert Frost. 

  


_Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,  
And sorry I could not travel both  
And be one traveller, long I stood  
And looked down one as far as I could  
To where it bent in the undergrowth;_

A teacher once told Dean about these two roads - how everyone had their own journey they must complete, decisions to make, every choice leading down a different path. She rattled on about Oedipus and MacBeth and some kid named Pip and how their choices determined their paths, how different they’d be if they’d gone down the other road.

Dean knew those roads. He’d traveled them all. Seen them endlessly ribboning into tarry murkiness in front as the sun wavered over the blacktop…disappearing into nothingness in the rearview mirror as the hills faded into the night behind them; these never-ending trails criss-crossed the country like the paths of half-healed scars cutting through the landscape.

He knew what lay down those less traveled roads; it wasn’t some all-American dream of apple pie and football on Sundays. All that lay down those dark and dusty roads were nightmares brought to life – nightmares that more often than not enjoyed the taste of human flesh and blood.

Journeys like that get a person dead.

  


 _Then took the other, as just as fair,  
And having perhaps the better claim,  
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;  
Though as for that the passing there  
Had worn them really about the same, _

Sam always fell asleep on the long drives, never realizing the in-between place was where their family _lived_. Just kept his eye on the A and B, never that ethereal line between two points – the roads that defined their existence.

The in-between was family… _home_. It’s where their father was just their father, not single-mindedly focused on some new thing to kill, some new mystery to solve. In the in-between he was just _Dad_ , not a hunter, not anything but a warm laugh in the front seat, filling the endless silence of the in-between with veiled references to the Before and After.

Needed to listen to hear it – be as quiet as that dark road they were traveling.

Sam never had the patience to sink into the stillness and _listen_.

  


 _And both that morning equally lay  
In leaves no step had trodden black.  
Oh, I kept the first for another day!  
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,  
I doubted if I should ever come back._

Sam endlessly ranted about how their father had denied them the choice of which road to take. That he’d forced them onto this blood soaked, less traveled path without a thought as to what they might want for themselves. His outraged teenage righteousness denounced their father as some sort of dictator, imposing his will on every aspect of their lives.

It was easier for Sam to deny the road he knew he should take if he didn’t think he had a choice. 

He knew what Sam wanted - that well-paved, well-traveled path that everyone else took. Didn’t matter if his family bled themselves dry in the brambles on that other road, Sam had always wanted something different.

For Dean, there was no other option. Take the well-traveled path and the bodies would pile up. There was no question – not for him – of what road to travel.

Sam closed his eyes too tightly to see that Dean had made his choice – had made it that moment he carried his baby brother out of the house falling to ashes around them.

  


 _I shall be telling this with a sigh  
Somewhere ages and ages hence:  
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--  
I took the one less traveled by,  
And that has made all the difference._

Dean just wished they could travel the same road.

It would make all the difference. 


End file.
